Karl Kruszelnicki: still missing the missing links

This week we feature a recent article1 by popular Australian science personality
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki, a physicist and Skeptic, in which he chides creationists over the issue of ‘missing links’.
Andrew Lamb responds.

Missing link’s Gospel truth

When it comes to matters of evolution, Dr Karl is no old fossil. He’s always
thrilled to hear about any newly unearthed find.

There is a misconception here. We discover new organisms and unearth new fossils, but examples of evolution are not ‘unearthed’,
found or discovered. They are invented (like the
urmetazoa), constructed (like the
legged sea cow) or just blithely assumed and boldly asserted. The bones
we dig up don’t come with labels saying ‘I evolved from such-and-such’.
In fact, even if evolution were true, it is not possible that an instance of evolution could be discovered,
in the sense that a fossil or plant can be discovered.
Evolution, if it really did occur, would need to be observed. But as atheistic evolutionist Richard
Dawkins disingenuously admitted,
‘Evolution has been observed. It’s just that it hasn’t been observed
while it’s happening.’2
Indeed, outside of cartoons and movies, no creature has ever been observed to transform
into a different kind of creature.

Even in these supposedly enlightened times, the word ‘evolution’ still
raises some hackles, and in some pious circles is considered the equivalent of a
four-letter word.

It was only as recently as February 2008, that the Florida State Board of Education
finally allowed (by a close 4–3 vote)

Indeed the vote was close. One would think that with their multi-billion dollar
budgets, the Western world’s education systems and media could manage
a better showing. Yet polls consistently show that a huge proportion of Western-educated people
reject evolution. Why do evolutionists have such difficulty convincing
people that they evolved from slime? And why do they so consistently resort
to outlawing dissent, as they did in Florida?

However, it is prudent to fear the consequences of belief in evolution.
Mass murderers like Harris and
Klebold, Pekka-Eric Auvinen,
and Jeffrey Dahmer expressed
strong evolutionary ideas in relation to their killings. Consider too that the greatest
mass-murderers of all time, the atheist leaders
Stalin and Mao,
as well as the pagan Adolf Hitler,
used evolution as ‘scientific’ justification for their crimes.

rather than previous euphemisms such as ‘change over time’.

‘Change over time’ is indeed a euphemism, and one which the evolutionists
use to great effect to conflate the meaning of two entirely different phenomena, namely
1) the observable scientific phenomenon of natural selection, which involves limited change
within a population, and 2) the mythical pseudoscientific3 phenomenon of evolution of one kind of organism
into a different kind, which would require the coming into existence of encyclopedic
quantities of new genetic information coding for new types of organs, new kinds
of physiologies, etc. To conflate these two separate concepts is to commit the fallacy of
equivocation or bait-and-switch.

‘Change over time’ is indeed a euphemism, and one which the evolutionists
use to great effect to conflate the meaning of two entirely different phenomena

Mind you, the vote was very close, even though the teachers are specifically forbidden
to use the terrifying word ‘evolution’ by itself—instead ‘evolution’
always has to be preceded by the mollifying phrase ‘theory of’, as in
‘theory of evolution’.

Evolution is the process of change, from one generation to the next, of inherited
characteristics. The microbiologists see it happening all the time, as bacteria
evolve to beat the antibiotics that we have so painstakingly developed.

A part of this process of evolution is the ‘Missing Link’ (or to give
it the proper technical name, Transitional Fossil). A missing link would have characteristics
of both its ancestors, and its descendants.

In the USA, the anti-evolution creationists are dead-set against acknowledging the
very concept of the missing link. They claim that no missing link has ever been
found, anywhere in the world.

The evolution exists only in the stories told about those bones and organisms by
the evolutionists.

Leading creationists do not claim this. And re ‘found’, as pointed out
earlier it is organisms and fossils that are found, not evolution. The evolution
exists only in the stories told about those bones and organisms by the
evolutionists.

There are always a currently popular handful of disputed transitional forms. Inevitably, as
more facts come to light, and as sober evaluation replaces the initial gush of evolutionary
enthusiasm and hype, each alleged transitional form is shown to be completely bird,
completely fish, etc., perhaps, at best, having some mosaic features. However for
the time being, such fossils are regarded by the evolutionary establishment as genuine transitional
forms.

Many people are naturally skeptical (this includes Christians—see
Antidote to superstition and Scepticism), and when challenged by a new idea will automatically
try to think of a counter-example to disprove it. If creationists use emphatic language
like ‘not a single transitional form’ or ‘none, ever, anywhere’ it can act like a goad, provoking
skeptics to strive to try to find a loophole—to think of a mere single counter-example needed to disprove the claim. If someone is aware of even just one of the many obsolete or the few current transitional fossil claims, they
can then use this as an excuse to reject as untrustworthy the whole creationist argument
against transitional fossils. This, in part, is why
our ministry advises against making categorical claims like ‘there
are no transitional forms’. Instead, it is better, and accurate, to say ‘if
evolution were true, there should be thousands of transitional forms, but all we
have are a handful of disputed examples’. See here and here for example.

Would you believe it, but their claim is actually a wicked fib.

Ahem! Dr Kruszelnicki you seem to be assuming that fibbing is bad, and that there exist such things
as ‘wicked’ and ‘good’. But if evolution is true, then human
consciousness is just an epiphenomenon of electrical activity in the brain, arising
from millions of years of mutations, and so you have no basis for assuming that there
exist such things as objective/absolute/universal good and bad. And even assuming
good and bad do exist, evolution gives no basis for assuming that statements
that accurately reflect reality (truths) are somehow better than statements that
do not (fibs). Stop plagiarizing creationist assumptions to argue against creation.

We are open about our presuppositions (bias)
while evolutionists tend to deny that they start with their answer (There is no Creator …) and work backwards
to get evolution (… and yet we exist, therefore we must have evolved).

What is a wicked fib, and one recognised by the formal legal term slander,
is to make unfounded public accusations like the above.

Charles Darwin wrote his Origin of Species in 1859. He very honestly pointed
out that the lack of any missing link found up to that date was ‘the most
obvious and gravest objection’ that could be mounted against his theory.

Indeed he did, and indeed it is. And as leading palaeontologist Colin Patterson
of the British Museum of Natural History said 120 years later, ‘there is not
one such fossil [i.e. transitional fossil] for which one could make a watertight
argument. The reason is that statements about ancestry and descent are not applicable in the fossil record. … It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another… But such stories are not part of science…’4 See That
quote!—about the missing transitional fossils.

But in 1861, only two years later, the very first missing link was found. Archaeopteryx
was the missing link that ‘joined’ the birds and the dinosaurs, because
it had characteristics of both.

Archaeopteryx is a true bird, as acknowledged by leading (including evolutionist)
experts such as Dr Alan Feduccia, who famously wrote ‘Paleontologists have
tried to turn Archaeopteryx into an earth-bound, feathered dinosaur. But
it’s not. It is a bird, a perching bird. And no amount of “paleobabble”
is going to change that.’5

On the bird side, it had feathers, wings and a wishbone. On the dinosaur side, it
had jaws with sharp teeth, a long bony tail and three fingers with claws.

Sharp teeth, long bony tails, and fingers with claws are hardly unique to dinosaurs.
There exist reptiles, mammals and yes, even birds, that exhibit these features.
Several species of living birds have wing claws and several species of extinct birds
had teeth—see Living dinosaurs
or just birds? There was much greater variety in birds in the past. Loss
of features such as claws, bony tails and teeth is a degenerative process, but evolution
would require generative processes, producing nascent new kinds of organs,
etc.

And for the horse, by the late 1800s, a quite clear set of transitional fossils
had been found. They covered some 50 million years, documenting the evolutionary
changes that led to the modern horse.

Fossil horses do not show a consistent progression in features, no matter which of the various different sequences one consults (several have been proposed). Formerly ubiquitous in textbooks, the horse series is now discredited as just speculative arrangement. And evolutionary mythology doesn’t
just handicap understanding of fossil horses:

‘One enduring myth holds that Arabian horses [hailed as the evolutionary ‘fountain head’ of the world’s breeds, Ed.] have one fewer lumbar vertebrae
than horses of other breeds. While it may be true that some Arabians have only five,
the same can be true of all breeds. “In necropsy studies I did with Thoroughbreds,
maybe 20 to 30 percent had only five lumbar vertebrae,” says Kevin Haussler,
DVM, DC, PhD. of Colorado State University.’ 6

And over the 20th century, many more such transitional fossils have been found,
making the sequence of changes leading to the modern horse more complete.

Actually, further finds have only complicated the story, not made it clearer. And as we have explained in ‘horse series is now discredited’ (above), nearly all the fossils look like mere variations in the horse kind; there is no directional change towards some fitter horse.

As explained, in regard to supposed transitional fossils in general, what is actually found is usually fragmentary fossil bones, shells, teeth and other hard parts. The ‘transitional’ is all in the explanation given by evolutionists to fit the bones into their framework of understanding.

As another example, we have a very detailed set of missing link fossils that take
us from the fish to the amphibian—the famous ‘fishibian’ sequence.

‘Very detailed’ is misleading. What they have is many fragmentary fossils, and these fragments are studied and expatiated
upon in great detail. But it is this very fragmentary nature itself that
makes them suitable as candidate transitional forms, because the evolutionists are
then free to speculate on the missing parts. On several occasions scraps of fish skull
have been announced with fanfare as the remains of legged fish, despite the absence of leg bones. This is the same
sort of zealous over-enthusiasm that resulted in a whole spate of single teeth being declared
to be new species of hominid (see ‘Southwest Colorado Man’ and the year of the one-tooth wonders).

And more recently, fossils found in Pakistan have filled in the gaps in the sequence
that takes us from amphibians to reptiles onto primitive mammals and then to whales-with-legs
and finally to whales-without-legs.

And just in May 2008, another missing link was found—it had characteristics
of both frogs and salamanders.

As we reported in a subsequent article, Creative frogamandering, the fossil concerned, Gerobatrachus hottoni, is actually missing its legs and the front of its pectoral girdle! Many who wrote enthusiastic evolutionary media reports about this creature may not have realized no legs were found, due to the jargon used in the scientific paper—this reported that the fossil lacked ‘stylopods’ and ‘zeugopods’, terms that the journalists may not have realized referred to the upper and lower limb bones respectively. Without these bones, it is rash to claim anything about how this creature walked (hopped?).

It has always been these gaps (that would be filled by missing links) that the creationists
have seized upon.

Since evolution predicts almost countless transitional
forms, it is perfectly reasonable for creationists to point out that evolutionists
can only produce a handful of debatable examples. But it is a bit uncharitable of Dr K to imply that we always seize upon these gaps. There are numerous egregious
weaknesses in evolution in addition to the gaps-in-the-fossils problem, and we
try hard to bag all these weaknesses equally vigorously . See for example our articles
on the Origin of Life problem (i.e.
refuting theories of chemical evolution),
the increase in information problem, the
thermodynamics problem, the
probability problems …

But it’s perfectly reasonable to have gaps in the fossil record.

The fossil record is remarkably complete—97.7
percent of living orders of land vertebrates are represented as fossils

But this is not so. The fossil record is remarkably complete—97.7
percent of living orders of land vertebrates are represented as fossils and 79.1
percent of living families of land vertebrates—87.8 percent if birds are excluded,
as they are less likely to become fossilized.7 The only reason to call it ‘gappy’
is the scarcity of the transitional forms that evolution expects. But it’s circular reasoning to use the expectation of many transitional forms and their subsequent failure to materialize as an argument for gappiness. See The links are missing.

In short, virtually all the kinds of creature found living today are also found as fossils.

There are certainly patterns of fossils and physical gaps (i.e. fossil-free zones) in the sedimentary strata. With a global Flood, these are easily explained
in terms of ecological zoning (sea-floor organisms buried first, highland organisms
last, etc.), differential mobility, hydrodynamic sorting (low-buoyancy organisms
first, etc.), and Flood dynamics. As a skeptical journalist remarked on a geology excursion to the revered (by
evolutionists) Walcott Quarry fossil site, part of the Burgess Shale formation
in Canada’s Yoho National Park: ‘Everybody else here sees the origin
of life embedded in these rocks, but I just see nice, albeit significant, patterns.’8

Dr K is playing a bit of journalistic trickery on the reader here—as if the supposed long time it took to form the fossils meant that it would take a long time to find them! There is absolutely no relationship between the two. It would be like saying because the Great Wall of China had an active history of some 1,000 years that it would take a thousand years to discover it. This statement by Dr K is nothing but a smokescreen to try to deflect the issue of the myriad missing transitional forms.

Like facts, fossils do not always ‘speak for themselves’. Suppose one encounters a
fossil. By itself it is just a lump of rock in the shape of an animal or plant.
For centuries people did not know what fossils were:

‘Neoplatonism held that the funny fossil shapes were controlled by mysterious
astral influences, and Aristotelianism attributed marine-looking fossils to the
transport of “seeds” of ocean-dwelling organisms that got carried inland
and grew in place after lodging in the cracks.’9

Photo wikipedia

Ammonite fossil

And some reportedly still don’t. Tibetans are said to believe that ammonite fossils are miraculous reproductions
of the Buddhist wheel of life.10

Only two continents have been moderately well-explored for fossils (North America
and Europe) and there, more often accidentally via the digging of mines and quarries,
and the carving of roads into hills.

Further, you need a very specific and uncommon set of circumstances to make fossils,
such as sediment, or lack of oxygen to stop decay.

Excellent! Now we are making progress. The global Flood constituted just such uncommon
conditions, providing the circumstances that produced the bulk of the world’s
fossils.

Also, not all animals fossilise well, and small, fragile, forest-dwelling animals
with many soft parts are the worst.

More progress. A mere two decades ago, evolutionists scoffed and scorned at those
with the temerity to suggest that jellyfish-shaped impressions they found in Ediacarian
rocks were actually fossil jellyfish. Evolutionists are discarding their former no-soft-fossils
dogma, but it is not easy for them—see Hundreds of jellyfish
fossils!

And finally, most reports on transitional fossils are written in detailed and dense
language in relatively obscure scientific journals.

Not really. It’s just that every one of the thousands of fossils discovered
is placed somewhere within the evolutionary framework. Few are claimed as transitions
between one kind of organism and another. Those that are pronounced transitional
are normally acclaimed in the media with great fanfare, and then quietly dropped
as more information or better (critical) analysis negates their candidate transitional
status. But the public remembers the ‘transitional fossil’ hoo-ha, and rarely gets
to hear the later muted retractions.

So you can see that it’s easy for the creationists to be creative and selective
with the truth.

Image <www.skeptics.com.au>

As followers of Christ, we put great value on truth and integrity. And in accordance
with Scripture we ‘test all things, holding fast to what is good’ (1 Thessalonians 5:21). I challenge Dr K to demonstrate (as
opposed to merely asserting) a single erroneous fact (as opposed to merely interpretations he finds disagreeable) on Creation.com. We are open about our presuppositions (bias)
while evolutionists tend to deny that they start with their answer (There is no Creator …) and work backwards to get evolution (… and yet we exist, therefore we must have evolved).

Most Skeptics delight in equating belief in creation to belief in a flat earth,
implicitly perpetuating the urban myth that Europeans in the Middle Ages were less
intelligent and believed the earth was flat (see Does the Bible really teach a flat earth?). To his credit, Dr K does not use this
particular slur against creationists, and in fact has boldly denounced the flat
earth urban myth.11

It is disappointing that people who pride themselves on their skepticism should
be so unwilling to apply their skepticism to evolution. Skeptics fancy themselves immune
to gullibility, and yet refuse to question the assumptions and dogmas of evolution.

Which is why it was such a delight to read the Sydney Morning Herald of
21 February 2008. Scientists had found that an insignificant ‘little round
ball of algae’ was actually a living missing link between Apicomplexan parasites
(which cause human diseases, most notably malaria) and dinoflagellates (water-borne
creatures, some of which can cause ‘red tides’ that leave us with poisonous
shellfish).

Dr K is referring to Chromera velia. We are planning to publish soon a critique of the ‘missing link’ claims made about this microorganism (keep watching our website). It sounds like it could be a case of a benign organism degenerating into a pathogenic specialized organism. Cases of this sort of change include:

This is one of the few bottom-of-the-harbour schemes that has brought us closer
to the truth, and it benefits the Public Good.

Regardless of what the creationists like to think or say, missing links are all
around us, and they’re making a Gospel Truth of evolution.

No, distinctive kinds of creature are all around us, and they’re making offspring after their kind, just
as the Bible says. We observe variation and degeneration within each kind, including
adaptive changes in daughter populations enabling them to survive better in particular
niche environments. But organisms are never observed to change into different kinds
of organisms. Such transitions exist only in the stories told about them by evolutionists,
as they try to shoehorn the recalcitrant facts of nature into their evolutionary framework of
understanding.

Recommended Resources

An updated and much-enlarged edition of Dr. Gish’s classic book Evolution:
The Fossils Say No! The most compelling critique available anywhere of the supposedly
key argument for evolution: the fossil record. Dr. Gish documents, from the writings
of evolutionists, the complete absence of true evolutionary transitional forms.
Softcover.

Dr Batten deals with the claimed apeman fossils in the evolutionary tree promoted by the Smithsonian and shows how
the stories do not add up. The fossil patterns fit a post-Flood dispersal of apes and a somewhat later post-Babel dispersal of humans.
Shows how detailed illustrations have been imaginatively created from fragmentary fossils!

Karl Kruszelnicki, Mythconceptions: What goes around …, Weekender <theweekender.com.au>. [This article appeared in the print version of Weekender magazine several years ago. We have a photocopy on file. A.L.] Return to text.

Published: 5 July 2008(GMT+10)

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